Many transaction card companies use batch processing to authorize transactions. However, such batch authorizations are typically not “real time”, and thus, authorizing a large number of transactions is often secondary priority to real-time authorizations. As such, transaction card companies are usually not able to guarantee processing of transactions at sufficiently fast rates.
Insufficient processing speed is common with billing processing, wherein a merchant (e.g., a utility company) may send one or more files to a transaction card company for authorization multiple times over a certain time period. Each of the files may each contain over 50,000 different billing transactions that need authorization. The turn-around time for authorizing these large transaction files may easily exceed four hours, but such long turn-around times are often undesirable and inconvenient. Accordingly, a longstanding need exists for increasing the speed of billing transaction authorizations.